Gary Saul Morson on radical certainty
As seen in Vladimir Lenin and Ayn Rand
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University, most notably a scholar of Russian literature and an historian of Russian intellectual history. This is taken from his “Atlas Schlepped” in the Jewish Review of Books.
The Russian terrorist Vera Figner, a leader of the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, recalled how she lost respect for her father when he replied to a serious question: “I do not know.” This answer filled the child with “burning shame.” All important questions, Figner knew, have clear answers, and all reasonable people accept them.
Figner didn’t weigh pros and cons. No sooner did she hear some indubitably correct answer than she adopted it. Regardless of counterevidence, she never questioned a belief, just as one never doubts a mathematical proof. Figner was by no means unusual. This way of thinking—this certainty about being absolutely certain—characterized both the prerevolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia and, after the Bolshevik coup, official Soviet thought. . . .
When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. One can divide prerevolutionary Russian thought into two strongly opposed traditions: that of the radicals and that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and other great writers. . . .
Where the radicals found everything simple, the great writers discovered ambiguity. Instead of certainty, they cultivated wonder at the complexity of people and the world. They knew that great art cannot be written to convey ready-made political messages. . . .
As [Rand biographer Alexandra] Popoff observes, she [Ayn Rand] attributed all doubt to wickedness, much as Lenin deemed it counterrevolutionary. “Nothing in Marxism is subject to revision,” he insisted. “There is only one answer to revisionism — smash its face in!” Nobody except “bourgeois vermin” and “harmful insects” raised humanitarian objections, which Lenin characterized as “moralizing vomit.” For Rand, altruism was “absolute evil” and an opponent was “a parasite,” “a looting thug,” “a mooching mystic,” or “a metaphysical monstrosity.”
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"They knew that great art cannot be written to convey ready-made political messages. . . " A lesson easily learned in museums and galleries, books and theaters, to this day! Wonderful excerpt, perhaps the clearest through-line yet from Lenin to "critical theory."